5 January 2018. A World to Win News Service. The Iranian regime has been shaken by a week of intense and often violent protests in as many as 80 cities and towns all across the country. Unlike the last political upheaval in 2009, when many urban, middle class demonstrators sided with so-called reformist factions within the regime, this time the people taking to the streets, overwhelmingly young men, were mainly from poor and lower-middle class neighbourhoods, often on the outskirts of urban areas where many have arrived from the countryside over the last decade. The regime has considered such people a key part of its social base, or at least counted on them to keep silent. Yet what has most marked this movement is the way it has targeted the whole regime and the Islamic Republic itself, including all of its factions.

11 December 2017. A World to Win News Service.The following is the text of the opening talk given at Refuse Fascism mass meetings around the country. It is being reprinted and distributed by the AWTW News Service because of its importance for summing up the critical situation in the US in the battle to drive out the Trump/Pence fascist regime, and because of the lessons it offers for struggles in many other places facing similar challenges.

11 December 2017. A World to Win News Service. U.S. President Donald Trump’s announcement that the U.S. would recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital has been seen by too many people as “ego driven” or otherwise irrational, an attempt to distract from his roiling political and legal challenges. This is a misreading of an extremely dangerous situation. There is ample evidence that the Trump regime had planned this move long before his current political troubles. In fact, it was another of his campaign promises that too few liberals took seriously.

A World to Win News Service for 5 December 2017 contains two articles – one on the Trump-Pence regime, including a short excerpt from a speech by Bob Avakian and some glimpses of the struggle to drive out that regime, including a separate PDF file of images from the 4 November protests; and another article from Mexico.

29 November 2017. A World to Win News Service. Surprise and shock rattled all of Europe when the AfD (Alternative for Germany) more than doubled its previous score in the September federal elections and entered the German parliament. Unfortunately, many people saw this turn of events as an anomaly in a self-correcting system. How could fascists have deep and durable appeal in a country they already brought to disaster in World War 2? The four parties that have governed Germany in various combinations since the War had held out hope that by making concessions to AfD’s anti-immigration demands, they could undercut AfD’s appeal, shore up the political centre and prevent further polarisation.

24 October 2017. A World to Win News Service. In celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution we are reprinting the following from a larger piece entitled You Don’t Know What You Think You “Know” About… The Communist Revolution and the Real Path to Emancipation: Its History and Our Future.

23 October 2017. A World to Win News Service. November 4 begins demonstrations across the US calling for THIS NIGHTMARE MUST END: THE TRUMP/PENCE REGIME MUST GO! initiated by refusefascism.org. We want to promote any events that our readers can initiate in support of this bold step wherever you are. The following is excerpted from revcom.us.

8 October 2017. A World to Win News Service. When Catalonia, a region in north-eastern Spain, attempted to hold a referendum on its independence 1 October, the central state forbid it. Thousands of national police and paramilitary Guardia Civil were sent in to stop the voting.

2 October 2017. A World to Win News Service. What follows is a report from supporters of the new communism gathered in the Revolutionary Communist Manifesto Group in Europe (RCMG) who were involved in the massive protests held against the G20 summit in Hamburg on 7-8 July. This gathering of the heads of the world’s most powerful imperialist states, a time of unprecedented crisis around globally, represented a blatant affront and a serious challenge to the world’s people that had to be met head-on. It was a major political event at a crucial juncture in Europe and around the world.

17 September 2017. A World to Win News Service. Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya people – in numbers approaching half of the estimated million of this ethnic group living in Myanmar – have been driven from their homes and country by armed Buddhist militias and the army and police. These murderers have descended upon hundreds of villages, shooting into homes and burning whole villages. The army has laid anti-personnel land mines at crossing points on the border between Myanmar and Bangladesh to kill or maim those fleeing and prevent anyone from coming back.

16 August, 2017. A World to Win News Service. Hundreds of white supremacist, Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi fascist scum descended on Charlottesville, Virginia on 11-12 August, to hold a “Unite the Right” rally. They came to defend the statue of Robert E. Lee, who commanded the Confederate army that fought to keep slavery alive during the US Civil War, from being removed from a public park. They came to glorify the decades of open subjugation of Black people in this country under slavery and then vicious “Jim Crow” segregation – and to promote the continuation and intensification of this oppression today. And they came to brazenly celebrate the history of Hitler-ite fascism – and step up their fight to help consolidate the American fascist regime in the White House today.

1 August 2017. A World to Win News Service. On 24 June 2017 Amir Hassanpour, renowned revolutionary intellectual and revolutionary communist with long connections to the struggle in Kurdistan, Iran and elsewhere, passed away in Toronto, Canada.

On 22 July, 250 people of many nationalities gathered at the University of Toronto to honour and learn from Amir’s life. Memorials are planned in other cities as well.

19 June 2017. A World to Win News Service. Their names read like a roll call from some United Nations register – Mohammed, Khadija, Sheila, Felix, Marco, Antonio…. They were of all ages and came from dozens of countries and spoke as many languages. But at least 79 of them, and perhaps more – outcasts, poor, refugees from other countries or in their own land – all suffered the same fate, burned alive or plunging to their death in an inferno with a single source: a murderous capitalist system based on profit and not human needs.

16 June 2017. A World to Win News Service. By Robert Borba. The national elections held in the United Kingdom on 8 June came at a critical time in the world and the country, with little consensus among the ruling class about how to handle the increasingly acute contradictions that are shaking up the existing world order – from Brexit, with Britain to leave the European Union, to the establishment of the fascist Trump regime in the US, the sweeping away of the traditional governing parties in France in the recent Presidential elections there, and more.

30 May 2017. A World to Win News Service. Donald Trump’s arrival in Brussels was met by a spirited protest of about 10,000 people from cities in Belgium, neighbouring France and Germany, and other countries. A broad spectrum of political organizations, NGOs, student groups and individuals marched through the city centre behind a large banner reading “Trump Not Welcome”.

15 May 2017. A World to Win News Service. Emmanuel Macron, who beat the fascist Marine Le Pen in the final round of the French elections, was the consensus candidate around whom most of the French capitalist ruling class and its political representatives rallied. But that doesn’t change the fact that the man who won by a two-to-one margin represents a deeply unpopular programme opposed even by most of those who voted for him because he was the “least worst” candidate.

8 May 2017. A World to Win News Service. The final round of presidential elections in France took place on 7 May. Emmanuel Macron won by a two-to-one margin against the fascist candidate Marine Le Pen. A World To Win News Service will be reporting on this.

27 April 2017. A World to Win News Service. Whether the fascist Marine Le Pen wins or loses in the second round of the French presidential elections on 7 May, the first round produced a profound upheaval in the country’s political landscape.

27 April 2017. A World to Win News Service.It is with great sadness that A World to Win News Service learned of the recent death of AjithRupasinghe, generally known as comrade Surendra, a revolutionary communist leader from Sri Lanka.

7 April 2017. A World to Win News Service. US President Trump’s cruise missile attack on a Syrian airbase can only ratchet up the horrors being inflicted on the Syrian people by multiple rival enemies. It is part of a stepped-up US-led intervention in Syria and Iraq that has already killed about 3,000 civilians, according to Airwars.org. Further, it threatens wider wars in the region and the whole world.

27 March 2017. A World to Win News Service. The US and its coalition have been carrying out stepped-up terror attacks in Iraq and Syria, killing almost 1,000 civilians since the beginning of March, according to the UK-based monitoring group Airwars.org.

Editorial:

Introducing a transformed AWTWNS

14 March 2017. A World to Win News Service. With great joy, the editors of A World To Win News Service announce its transformation into a more thorough-going tool for revolution based on Bob Avakian's new synthesis of communism.

AWTW News Service first saw life in January 2003, at a critical juncture when under the banner of their global "war on terror" the US-led imperialists had launched and were expanding what was in fact a war for empire. After invading Afghanistan, they were preparing to invade Iraq. It was a time when a powerful people's war was surging forward in Nepal, led by revolutionaries who were participants in the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement. RIM gathered communists from around the world who, in the wake of the defeat of the revolution in China following the death of Mao Tsetung, banded together from the five continents to strengthen the struggle to do away with the capitalist system through revolution.

AWTW News Service was inspired by RIM, which based itself on Marxism-Leninism-Maoism (MLM). During the years since then, the news service untiringly exposed the crimes of the imperialists in many corners of the globe, bringing to light stories of popular resistance against oppression, analysing how all oppression was ultimately rooted in the system of capitalism-imperialism, and pointing to the need for the solution, revolution.

These past fourteen years have seen major developments, including the collapse of RIM itself. Not only are some of the forces previously united in RIM now sharply opposed to each other, the previous understanding of revolutionary communism itself has, to borrow Mao Zedong’s term, "divided into two". One strand of the old Maoism has wound up in a social-democratic liquidation of the core revolutionary principles of Marxism, exemplified tragically in the capitulation of the Maoist leadership in Nepal and the termination of the revolutionary war there. Others from the previous MLM movement are stuck in a dogmatist, religious-like upholding of sterile "Maoist" formulas that are equally devoid of revolutionary content. In opposition to this, Bob Avakian's new synthesis of communism has fully emerged, rescuing the scientific kernel of communism while criticizing and repudiating those secondary aspects in the past understanding and actions of communists that have actually gone against communism's liberatory nature. The result is that we now have a qualitatively more scientific framework for understanding the world and changing it through revolution, which is gaining adherents from among forces previously part of RIM as well as others more recently attracted to communism. (For more on RIM, its history, its collapse and the division of Maoism into two, see Communism: The Beginning of a New Stage – A Manifesto from the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA and Letter to Participating Parties and Organizations of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement by the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA.)

And how the world cries out for revolution! Everywhere inequality has intensified, women face the violent intensification of patriarchy and degradation, and whole states in parts of the Third World are written off as "failed" and left to rot. The hopes of millions worldwide that soared as US-backed dictators were toppled by mass uprisings in the “Arab Spring” were dashed with the re-consolidation of reactionary rule. War has ripped gaping wounds in the Middle East as the Western imperialists and their local allies contend with reactionary Islamic jihadists, trapping the masses in a vortex of terror and despair. Millions have been driven from their homes, and thousands drown in desperate attempts to cross the Mediterranean to safety – while those few who make it face ever higher walls erected by these same imperialists to keep them out, physical walls as well as the walls of hatred being whipped up against them. Now, after years of normalizing mounting levels of nationalist jingoism, racism and misogyny, the dynamics of this system have propelled the fascist Donald Trump into the post of commander-in-chief of US imperialism. This in turn is giving major impetus to fascist movements that have been steadily gnawing their way into the political mainstream of Europe – in Austria, Hungary and Poland, and now the Netherlands, France, Germany and elsewhere. Throughout the oppressed nations too, the rise of “strong men” like India's Modi, Turkey's Erdogan, Duterte in the Philippines and others, tells the same story: the post-World War 2 order is rapidly coming apart at the seams.

The most fundamental question facing humanity today is whether this great turmoil will give rise to the establishment of regimes that are far more repressive and reactionary than even those today, with an unprecedented intensification of oppression and inequality, the unleashing of war and famine, environmental catastrophe and potentially far worse, or whether the oppressed can be enabled to rise, led by a core of conscious revolutionaries, and dismantle the existing state apparatuses in key parts of the world and establish radically new state powers that begin to do away with all oppression and exploitation. This has everything to do with how well hundreds and thousands today can be armed with a scientific approach to reality and act on that basis. Today this means transforming AWTW News Service into one firmly based on Avakian's new communism, a task that is proudly being assumed by the communists who have been the driving force in it over these years – a task that you are being asked to join in, in countless ways: reposting, distributing, writing, reporting, debating and corresponding with it, to name but a few.

Articles are needed that lay bare how the source of every kind of oppression in every country is ultimately rooted in the capitalist-imperialist system, whether it be through analysing the coup d'etat in Turkey, the failure of the Syriza experiment in Greece, the rise of fascism in the US and Europe, etc.

The news service needs analysis that lays bare the major faultlines ripping through every class-divided society and propelling millions into questioning and resistance, to help increasing numbers make the leap from being fighters on one front against capitalist oppression to fighters on every front. To take just one example, it needs to highlight the many different ways that brave forces are stepping outside normal channels to resist the draconian measures being enacted against migrants, exposing how it is the capitalist-imperialist system that is driving immigration and clamping down on migrants. It has to help establish a powerful internationalist current around this burning issue – showing why and how it is essential that the "whole world comes first", rather than "what does this mean for me and my country" – so as to bridge borders between peoples, to change not only what people think but how they think, to train them in the communist line and outlook. Or, in relation to patriarchy, to bring out why you cannot break all the links in the chain of capitalist oppression except one, why leaving male supremacy unchallenged quickly opens the door to the strengthening of every form of division and inequality. All this is part of the process of "fighting the power and transforming the people, for revolution" – and not least of all, bringing forth a new generation of revolutionary leaders in this process, who can use this news service to help identify and bring together more revolutionary forces wherever they may be.

It is critical to expose the system and its institutions and structures, but it is also vital to put forward the solution, a new kind of state power and a new way of organising the society and economy to meet people's needs in the broadest, most liberating sense, and step-by-step enable people to make the transition, through revolution, to a whole new world of flourishing humanity, armed with critical thinking and free of the shackles of class, patriarchy and all social divisions and inequalities. To do this we need to take on and tear apart the reactionary verdict on revolution and socialism. Otherwise, our criticism of the existing system loses force and purpose. Furthermore, based on the new synthesis summation of the socialist experiences of the 20th century, we need to show the necessity, possibility and desirability of Avakian's re-envisaged socialist society – how it not only meets the basic needs of the people, but will be a vibrant society marked by an unprecedented flourishing of intellectual and cultural life.

Without BA's new communism and the understanding that has developed on the basis of his approach and method, even for those who have vital elements of understanding about how thoroughly rotten all that exists really is, it is difficult to understand that the world doesn't have to be the way it is, that the potential for a radically different way of living for all humanity lies entangled in today's web of contradictions that are driving society, trapping oppressed humanity in dog-eat-dog relations, and threatening unprecedented disasters. Avakian's visionary understanding of the goal of communism shows how that is not only possible, but an urgent necessity, crying out for action right now.

With this understanding as the solid foundation of the news service, its pages will be open to others who, from different perspectives and approaches, bring to the light of day otherwise hidden stories of resistance and opposition to the prevailing order, shed light on the crimes of the system and how it works, reveal the complexity of the forces at work, and do all this in a way that compels others to turn to this site as a vibrant hub of critical analysis and debate. To truly become a weapon for revolution in growing parts of the world, articles need to be shared, correspondence is needed, key articles translated into different languages, and more. To further this, the news service will rupture from its weekly edition format that has been more oriented to the print media epoch, and instead focus on releasing articles on the Web hot on the heels of major events in the world. We need contributions from all those able to help so that the now far too narrow scope of our articles, limited by our current abilities, can begin to better match the needs of what must necessarily be a global revolutionary process.

Hard truths need to be stated clearly from the outset: the strength of the forces worldwide fighting for communist revolution pales in comparison to the immense challenges before us. But it is an even more important truth that never before in history has there existed a clearer and more scientific understanding of the source of oppression and what is needed to do away with it. On this foundation, A World To Win News Service can and must become a powerful tool serving all those who long for an end to oppression and exploitation, drawing forward and training thousands and influencing millions in many countries around the world, hastening the day when humanity can break free of the shackles that have enchained it for all too long.